What’s New in Facebook

Facebook Home

In April Facebook announced Facebook Home – their “phone” – it is a social layer you can add to your Android phone and is currently available in the USA.

Since its launch on April 12 is has been downloaded more then 1/2 a million times – which although sound like a big number doesn’t necessarily mean it is taking off …yet! As it is only available for 4 mobile phone models to date – we will have to wait and see what happens once more phones are able to support this software

At TMPNow we tend to let these new features role out and give FB time to smooth out the wrinkles before jumping headfirst into them – as often there are revisions; and we learn by trial and error as to what works and what doesn’t with The New and Improved Facebook Evolution.

I will post in our blog about the new News Feed and Timeline Changes of March 2013, as well as the latest …. a Facebook Phone.

Facebook have been testing a new format for their Timeline apparently in New Zealand.

It appears there will be a restructuring of the placements of advertising as well as new options to like posts along with encouragement to generate more likes and shares. We should expect these changes to occur over the next month or so. (March, 2013)

This new feature – Graph Search – will let a person search for people, places, photos, and interests of their Facebook community and provide search results which will be constrained by the privacy settings of each user within that specific person’s Facebook Community.

Furthermore, it is opening the door to a whole new business opportunity for Facebook with links to friend recommended media such as music and TV shows as well as a local focus on businesses, such as neighbourhood restaurants and other entertainment options.

Global Facebook Pages for International Marketers:

“Offering a new structure to business pages for global brands aimed to provide a better, localized experience for international brands’ prospects and customers. The new structure consolidates a business’ global Facebook presence into one place while still providing a localized experience.”

In Facebook’s own words – October 17, 2012: “Every month people from around the world engage with their favorite brands on Facebook. Today we’re excited to announce Global Pages, a new structure that provides the best, localized experiences for a brand’s customers, available to all brands working with Facebook.

With this new structure, Facebook users will be directed to the best version of a Page based on the country those users are in, enabling them to see localized cover photos, profile photos, Page apps, milestones, “about” information, and news feed stories from Pages—all while remaining part of the global brand community.

Each brand’s Global Pages structure will include local Pages for specific markets (single- or multi-country regions) and a default Page for all other markets.”

Just where will Facebook Ads lead to? A very interesting article on privacy and the online world of advertising:

{“….To amp up the effectiveness of its ads, Facebook in recent months has begun allowing marketers to target ads at users based on the email address and phone number they list on their profiles, or based on their surfing habits on other sites.

A clothing store, for example, could use the service to target customers based on their past purchase habits, or a bank could target ads just at customers with high bank balances.

Many of Facebook’s new services echo ad-targeting capabilities that companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. have offered for years, and Facebook said it takes pains to follow industry data practices.

At the core of Facebook’s expanding ad strategy is the fact that the social network knows a lot about its users’ true identities. While Google largely makes inferences about people based on their searching and browsing habits, Facebook is built on people volunteering personal information that’s valuable to marketers, including names, friends, phone numbers and tastes….”}

“The number one thing about Facebook is that you absolutely have to be there for the community you build. Your customers are there now, and the number of them is growing. With millions of people on Facebook, you need to establish a position and a brand that will expand as the number of users grows.” via Squidoo

http://mashable.com/2012/06/11/international-social-networks/FB leads the way in global social networks – other include in Russia (Odnoklassniki), China (QZone), Vietnam (Zing) and Latvia (Draugiem). and Badoo -the battle for the second position between Twitter and LinkedIn or, especially in Europe, between Badoo and Twitter,”